The Great American Parking Scam

Welcome to the Asphalt Jungle of Anxiety and Metered Extortion

Check this out - I’m coming out of the goddamn West Hollywood Library yesterday, a supposedly free institution, a government-sanctioned sanctuary of learning for the masses, and I am feeling… kind of virtuous. I’ve been holed up in there, working like a dog all day, hammering out words for some gig with hard deadlines. I validate my parking ticket like a good little citizen and walk back to my car, feeling accomplished, maybe even a little euphoric, and then - BAM - the machine flashes $12 at me like it’s doing me a favor. Reminds me that, yes, even here, even in this refuge of human knowledge, there’s a price to be paid.

Twelve bucks! To park at the library?! That can’t be right. I’ve been in there working my ass off, cranking out words in the company of homeless vagabonds and college kids who probably don’t even pay their taxes. I didn’t even get a coffee out of it. Just the brutal reality of a $12 charge to sit still for six hours in a place that’s supposed to be free. 

"Free" - the most ironic word in America.

And it’s not the money, right? Twelve bucks is inconvenient, annoying, but not catastrophic. What really stings is the feeling of being betrayed by a system that pretended to offer you something for free, but actually had a quiet little trap laid for you the whole time because you drove. It's like this whole parking structure is a metaphor for how society lulls us into thinking we’re moving freely through space, pursuing our goals, making choices, but all along, these invisible structures are nickel-and-diming us. It’s a surreal kind of thing, where everything looks innocuous, even boring, until you start to see they’re charging us for the privilege of existing in our own goddamn cities. 

So what do I do? I walk back up the stairs to the library. I must have scanned the parking ticket incorrectly in the little machine by the door. That’s all. I’m not stingy but it’s the principle of validation. It’s validating. There’s no reason I can’t go back in, talk to someone, figure this shit out like a rational human being. I approach the librarian holding my ticket like it’s gold and fell out of a candy bar, and quietly ask him to uncover the trick to this sick little validating machine.

 “Oh,” he says, with the sort of dead-eyed monotony that only bureaucrats can muster, “you came in at 10:15, see, it's almost 4pm.”

Yeah. And?

“We only validate for the first three hours. After that, you pay.”

What in the actual fuck? Three hours? I’ve spent entire days in libraries, lost in the joy of research, thinking maybe, just maybe, we had some little bastion of sanity left in this world where a woman could park her car without being bled dry. But no, three hours and then it’s time to cough up the dough. I suppose I should be thankful they didn’t stick me with a “convenience fee” for daring to breathe in their precious air.

I have to pay for the free library, I say to no one. He just looks at me. The shit these librarians must deal with, they didn’t need anymore from me. Paying the machine so the bar will rise and my car be allowed to rejoin the roads, I grumble, “stick to walking to cafes, Wynn.”

After the library I drive and look for parking, reading a street sign to make sure I would be good to go. See, my gym parking lot costs two dollars after validation and if I pay that every time, I end up paying more in parking than the gym membership every month. It’s insane. And extortion. So I find free street parking. 

After the gym, I drive home. I don’t have a parking spot at my apartment, so it’s a daily concern. In fact, I have an alarm set in my phone for forever reminders of street cleaning days or else a ticket. There’s no getting around the weird acceptance we have of what we are charged to drive and park. And here’s where it gets really ironic - our cars, which are supposed to symbolize mobility and independence, are basically just these huge, expensive, high-maintenance metal boxes we have to keep paying for, even when they’re standing still. We literally have to pay for not driving them. In this strange tapestry of urban life, the act of parking becomes an absurdist, hilarious commentary on the spectacle of the human condition itself. 

So, here I am, a sentient being capable of philosophical thought, reduced to a frenetic dance of desperation, I park, therefore I pay. What could be more absurd than this? The parking space is a symbolic battleground where your worth is measured by proximity to the entrance, your social status contingent upon the number of cars in line ahead of you. 

I was so consumed with the cost of going to the free library and the awareness of how much energy I spend on parking my goddamn car, I picked a book off my ‘to read’ pile called Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar that came out in May 2023. Yeah, this is a sociology book, but he touches on philosophical themes related to ethics and values in society and it lined up so well with the rant spinning in my head, I read it cover to cover. The prose has a brilliant, punk rock spirit that demands we think about this madness. It’s more a manifesto for the disenchanted, a rallying cry for anyone who’s ever felt the suffocating weight of urban monotony. This Grabar dude, he gets it, explaining how parking explains the world. He calls parking a "quietly influential force," but I call it a shakedown. We’ve turned our cities into parking lots at the expense of everything else like our homes, parks, and sanity. Grabar reports that,

“One study from 2017 found that U.S. drivers spent, on average, seventeen hours searching for parking every year—$345 per person in wasted time, fuel, and emissions—and the numbers were much higher in big cities.”

Shocking when parking is broken down like this but what he is really showing us here is far more sinister. America has built a cult of the car, and we’re all paying the price. Wasting our time, burning fossil fuels, and polluting the air.  The frustration and futility of Grabar’s numbers are amplified while we circle the block for the fourth time, tightening our grip on the steering wheel and wondering why the hell we keep playing along.

Grabar points out that we’ve devoted more space to idle cars than we have to living, breathing people writing,

“By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person.”

What a world, right? We’ve made more space for cars than humans. The thing is people live in their cars. Think of it. Car living. It’s a very real, very now, very American reality and there's an actual term for this, "vehicular homelessness," which sounds clinical and dispassionate, like something you'd hear on NPR sandwiched between segments. But, everywhere you go, you pass them, those four-wheeled homes tucked into alleyways, supermarket lots, or under a bridge. Rent’s too high, homelessness is through the roof (if you can find a roof) and hell, they’ve got jobs! They’re paying bills, and they’re still living in their cars! In sociology, they call this "the working homeless," which is this devastatingly efficient euphemism that sounds like a punchline from an Onion article, except it’s not, because people are working jobs, they have income, they’re contributing to the economy, and yet they still live in their cars because rent is higher than their take-home pay. The automobile is the final refuge where your rent is paid in gallons of unleaded and oil changes. 

Really think about that for a second, not in some detached, oh-that-sucks way, but really think about the logistics. How do they pee? Where do they sleep? When do they brush their teeth? What happens when they run out of gas and can’t afford to fill up the tank, meaning that not only is their home stranded but so are they? And the thing is, you pass by these people every day, almost everywhere. They’re there, like ghosts, parked in the shadow of your office building or in the far corner of that Target parking lot you pretend not to notice.

Cities actually have maps that show where it’s legal (or not) to sleep in your car. These are basically maps of where people are allowed to exist, except even that comes with conditions! Your car has to be empty to be legally parked in some places. So, you want to sit there and rest for a minute? Too bad. You want to sleep? Not here. There’s a profound lack of autonomy in this arrangement that feels distinctly Kafkaesque. Your home, your mode of transportation, your last vestige of privacy is suddenly under scrutiny by zoning laws and parking enforcement. Pull into some grocery store parking lots, and within minutes, some flashlight wielding rent-a-cop is banging on your window, demanding that you either shop or move along. And, fun fact, some parking lots have sensors to detect how long you’ve been parked in one spot. Just in case you thought they weren’t watching, because, god forbid you rest without being taxed, ticketed, or harassed by the security goons who patrol the lots like vultures. And, hilariously, tragically, if you sit too long without spending money, you can get ticketed.

It’s all tied up in this knotted mess of high rents, astronomical housing costs, and a general housing crisis that nobody seems to know how to solve or even talk about coherently without sounding like either a neoliberal shill or a radical idealist. Grabar shows us,

“Parking costs money and takes up space. More parking means less housing. In a 10-year study of low-income apartments in California … concluded that structured parking added $35,945 to the construction cost of every single home. Required parking costs the average American renter household $1,700 a year by one estimate, imposing a half-a-billion-dollar penalty annually on tenants who don’t drive. …”.

As a result, much of the nation’s most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Grabar states, 

“Neighbors who demand that new projects come with more parking are essentially levying a tax, one that drives up the cost of new homes and stops a countless number from being built at all.”

The irony here is almost too rich to swallow. Parking has become more important than housing. It’s determining the layout of our cities, how buildings are designed, how traffic flows, even how floodwaters move. Parking is a hidden hand shaping public space and yet, somehow, none of us seem to realize just how absurd this is. We’ve essentially chosen cars, those empty, stationary, non-living entities out our windows, over people. We’ve created this system where even sitting still becomes an act of resistance, where being homeless and working and living in a car is somehow less valued than ensuring that Walmart has enough empty spaces to accommodate weekend shoppers. 

Grabar takes us to several cities through his book and the details are incredible. For instance, he reports that, 

“The desert agglomeration of Phoenix has 12.2 million parking spaces, about 3 per person, 4.3 per vehicle, and 6.6 per job, divided more or less evenly between the street, commercial facilities, and home garages. Parking accounts for 10 percent of the manmade landscape in the Valley of the Sun.”

Ten percent of Phoenix is just parking. Just concrete. Wow. A city choking on its own heat, surrounded by desert, and they’ve decided to dedicate one-tenth of the entire manmade landscape to empty, idle cars. Not people. Not nature. Not even goddamn buildings. So, in a weird way, Phoenix isn’t just a city. It’s a kind of symbol for the entire American experiment, where instead of building for people or nature or even sanity, we’ve built a concrete wasteland dedicated to parking, to cars, to this massive, industrial idea of motion that actually traps us in place. And now, in 2024, we’re just waiting to see whether it’s the people or the asphalt that burns first.

The pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems and it doesn’t make sense. We pay taxes for the roads. We pay for the car. The insurance. We pay for the gas. The upkeep. Yet, there’s permit zones, time limits, and the specter of the dreaded ticket, a cruel reminder of your fallibility. We’re at the mercy of those meter maids. Those shadowy figures patrolling the streets like hawks, waiting for any sign of weakness. You slip in for a quick coffee run, hazards flashing, and come back to find a ticket plastered on your windshield like a scarlet letter. And those tickets? They don’t disappear, they grow. They mutate. Miss one? They’ll tack it onto your registration fee like a mafia hitman adding interest on a loan. No escape.

In the modern age of hyper-consumerism, where we are perpetually engaged in this Sisyphean struggle against the gravity of parking our cars. Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America. Each year, a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don’t resort to violence, we twist our lives professionally, socially, financially - just to find a spot. Our cities and homes have been reshaped to prioritize cheap, convenient car storage. 

But, this isn’t just about parking, though, right? It’s a reflection of a system designed to squeeze every last dime from us under the illusion of convenience. We rail against it, yet we comply, because what choice do we have? We need to park our cars.

So what do we do? We keep paying, like good little sheep, shuffling around the parking meters and feeding the machines. What’s the solution? Damned if I know. Grabar, bless his idealistic, anarchic heart, would like to torch every car in America and start over. Meanwhile, we keep searching for those little pockets of space where maybe, just maybe, we won’t get fined for existing. But we also know, deep down, that there’s always another meter lurking, another fee waiting for us, another part of the machine that’s going to squeeze us, one way or another. There’s this underlying, almost invisible mechanism ticking away, like a damn parking meter in the back of our mind, reminding us how expensive it is to be alive. And man, that $12 library parking fee? It’s the principle of the whole thing that really fired me up. Thanks for seeing the madness, Grabar. I hope everyone reads your work.